~The MCME Times~ #05/17

Minecraft Middle Earth is a Minecraft community that recreates the world described by JRR Tolkien and his writings. Everyone can participate in organized events in which we collaborate to create major landmarks, terrain, caves, castles, towns, farms and more.

Head Designer

Yay finally an MCME Times again! As a general announcement I would say that tendencially I am rather going to continue with less editions (towards one edition every two weeks), and instead make it proper and add some extra content bits if I find any. That will prevent the quality from decreasing, and leave me with a little more time to work on other things!

Currently we're experiencing a minor bug with the warp plugin, which prevents you from entering warp names that consist of multiple words the way you used to do it. Luckily @Emiel1000111 and @lw_spartan have found a fix to circumvent this bug until it's fixed: Simply put the warp name between single quotes, i.e. /warp 'minas tirith'
On the merrier side, it is now again possible to warp between worlds without having to issue /mvtp before!

And now, have a nice read; I'd say there's quite a bunch to todays edition!​

Some really incredible landscapes have first seen the light of day in the past two weeks in Andrast. The more extravagant ones are just right to still be credible in terms of realism and still honor the fact that after all we're in a fantasy world. Jacen has worked on really many a square mile of terrain recently, the progress is just amazing!​

What was a concept before is now being applied to the terrain in Northern Belfalas. Using the newly added chorus plant blocks, which look like thinner logs, the team around Eaglz has been creating already quite a large area of very ambient forest. In fact it's so nice that Brashexodus made a cinematic video almost solely for that forest (check it out below!)​

Luk has resumed work on Lamedon, or much rather, the part of the White Mountains bordering Lamedon. In the last two weeks he has proceeded giving the terrain a face lift all the way over the mountain peaks down to Aldburg. I'm curious what you have in mind for the area!​

In the Chamber of Light, Ganderp has worked on a really nice market square, with an open-air (or at least as far as you can go open-air inside a cave) restaurant! Beat has erected a rather large house, whose purpose I am unfortunately not able to identify yet, as the interior is still due. Furthermore he finished a storage room, as has thomas! Jesia seems to be working on a shop for herbs or something else you would store in many little pots. On the other hand Beat has also started with tearing down stuff, or in other words, how a house might come to look like when the years have left their traces on it...
Most importantly in CoL though, is that the lake surrounding the temple has now been properly created, which makes it all look already a whole lot closer to being complete

So, what's regarding the other parts of Moria: I am feeling really bad about that I am just completely incapable of keeping track whats going on, simply because it's so frikkin much. For this week I'll try to satisfy you with a series of screenshots featuring places I haven't seen before. For the future: I have an idea that may help a little, please read on for that!​

This week I finally got down to a testing session. I tried animating one of the catapults on the Minas Tirith walls, however realised at some point that it's a hell lot of work to build all the frames, and also pretty difficult to make the chain and such look somewhat nice. After giving Ivan some feedback on the plugin I decided to put that animation on hold for now; for testing I'll give some easier ones a try.
The feedback I gave (the plugin overall was real fun to use and working very decently!) was a new command "updateframe" which lets you make changes to an existing frame of the animation. So far you'd need to make a new frame and then replace the old frame with the new frame, which is a bit big of a hassle if you only want to make a small change to a frame.
Another idea was, as you usually spend quite a lot of time in the animation editor, building the frames, that there is an option to still use normal chat, now all command entries get interpreted as animation commands, while you're in the editor.
A while ago already there was also the idea of adding sounds to the animations. There is a quite large database of default minecraft sounds, from stepping sounds to firework explosions, and it would make the animations even more awesome, if you'd have a fancy sound play along with it.​

This weekend I have been able to make a great deal of progress on the new Gondor pack. I have added all the doors, which are actually more than just doors; it includes a set of thin walls (as we already have it with the light gray bricks now), just with all other kinds of materials as well, then also a 3 high barn door and a 4 block high palace gate (thanks to Eriol for the idea and the textures!)
Furthermore I found a place for all the new windows Fire created, and I even imported the window from the Rohan pack to Gondor, and they are all only as thin as a pane of glass would actually be (very thin).
I created/added models for a sandstone wall window, a cobble window and a slit window, all with properly shaped block models.
The bell now actually looks like a bell, rather than an egg.
Also I added all that has to do with pistons. I used up almost all states pistons can possibly be in, the retracted pistons are now variably placeable pillars, the extensions are tables/handles or a wheel/crank (model by NEEP), the piston bases are either a sandstone or light gray bricks chimney, or indented walls:

Next up will be all the flowers. It will be a pleasure gathering all the many textures that have been submitted in the past weeks, and combine them in an awesome new pack!​

Eriol has installed a first test version of this new plugin at the dev server and has successfully replaced all the stone blocks in half of Gondor (12.7 millionbillion blocks). It took the plugin about 20 minutes, but did not cause any lag.

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Rank Updates

This week we have the rare occasion to announce a new member of the Enforcer team! It's @SmaugJuice! Congratulations, and may you not be too sneaky on us!

I proudly announce you the first Foreman 2.0: @thomasd_17! He has show off his skills at leading jobs in a very good way; the trial job he got was to ruin a very hard to oversee area in Moria, with a lot of players joining. But even with all the many things going on at once he stayed calm and clear, and always had everyone completely in control. Seems like there's still a bug with the perms which prevents thomas from making jobs himself, so let's hope he can start with that soon...

As new Artist I give you @slaMoria! He has been putting an incredible amount of work into getting the rank. Please welcome him to the team and lend him a hand to find his way through the ways of the Artist rank!

We are not getting that many Artist applications recently. If you have considered applying, give it a shot! We'll sure give you all the advice you need to take the step to the next rank!​

Media of the week

This week we had a whole bunch of very eager photographers skimming the map for nice motives!

Andrast from an unusual perspective, by barteldvn
More recent work by bart can be found here: barteldvn's screenies

And very very importantly I need to mention @BRASHEXODUS, who has started a series of amazing cinematic videos! I show you one of them here, the others you can find in the Video section of our Art Department: Videos​

Upcoming

WANTED: Moria Reporters!

As you may have noticed, I am failing horribly at keeping track of all the progress thats going on in Moria. For that reason I would like to ask all of you, whether there's someone among you who would be interested in ledning me a hand there! Anyone, really, is wanted to get a reporter for the Moria project! That would include mainly hooking up with the staff, Foremen and Artists, who are contributing to Moria, what they have been doing in the past week, and report that to me, for that we finally can get proper reports about Moria!
So, if you really want to help me a great deal, please do speak up below!​

Facebook feedback survey

@Fireinferno13 is taking care of our Facebook page these days. If you've every noticed it in your feed, please take a minute and give him some feedback on it, using this quick survey: MCME Facebook Survey
Thanks a lot for your help!​

The Audiobook, hosted by @TI_020601 is taking place regularily on saturday evenings, 8pm GMT, unless announced otherwise in this thread: The New Audio Book​

Minecraft 1.12 News

So yeah, some tweets have already been made about Minecraft 1.12, and even though the amount information is still small (as you'd expect from tweets), it's safe to say that it is going to be an awesome update for us!
The features that have been pretty much confirmed so far are:

16 new dyed "smooth" blocks; they look somewhat like colored quartz.

16 new gravity-affected blocks; they look somewhat like dyed sand, although it's a different texture than sand. When the block lands in water it turns into another block, seems like it's one of the other 16 blocks above.

A function to save and restore your hotbar. A feature which will actually also be part of the new version of the Architect plugin and the custom inventories.

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Closing statement

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
- Terry Pratchett

Builds Diagonally

Currently we're experiencing a minor bug with the warp plugin, which prevents you from entering warp names that consist of multiple words the way you used to do it. Luckily @Emiel1000111 and @lw_spartan have found a fix to circumvent this bug until it's fixed: Simply put the warp name between single quotes, i.e. /warp 'minas tirith'
On the merrier side, it is now again possible to warp between worlds without having to issue /mvtp before!

Why though? Not that I mind it very much, but is there a max of worlds available? Otherwise I was thinking, maybe places like the old Dol Amroth and Ost-In-Edhil could be placed in the oldworld as well.

Head Designer

Why though? Not that I mind it very much, but is there a max of worlds available? Otherwise I was thinking, maybe places like the old Dol Amroth and Ost-In-Edhil could be placed in the oldworld as well.

First off, we won't make changes to the oldworld anymore, there's no point pasting any builds in there. Secondly, yes there is a limit, not in number of worlds, but in how much disk space we have on the server we pay for. That was the reason why freebuild got removed in the first place.

Hmm I can vouch for this. I have joined this server over 5 years ago. And yet I still remember my first tour by Madiired. If it wasn't for that introduction to the server I am not sure if I would have gotten as in involved in the server as I did.

I dont know why guides became so quite estranged with doing tours. It used to be a normal thing and people would actually apply for guides just to be able to give tours. Being helpful to new members just came naturally on the side. Now being friendly and helpful seems to be the main focus and tours have become a rarity. It is not something that happened over night, it kinda grew into this over the last couple years.I would love to see it change back but that is not easy.

Getting guides interested and motivated to do tours again is difficult since it is no longer their main part of the job. For that to change we would have to change the requirements but then we would have to find people actually motivated to do the tours. It should be as simple as artist. Artist apply to participate in building projects on the server. When an someone becomes artist and just builds stuff on freebuild it is an issue but it is an issue we can deal with because of the rank description. He is suppose to help with projects on the server if he doesn't then he can potentially lose that rank.
However with guides its different they are not recruited to do tours. But if they want to its a wonderful but its no longer their main goal. So in other words we can't intervene if they don't want to run tours.
Now i'm not trying to say we should force people to do stuff they don't want and if they don't we can simply get rid of them. I'm trying to say if the core of a rank is no longer serving the purpose we originally intended then we should look have a look at the core of that rank. If guides are no longer supposed to guide new people in the world we have created then how do we find people motivated to do tours. I really believe that the guide rank should revolve around guiding our new players in our world. Like doing tours that introduce new players to our server. And being helpfull should come naturally with that, the same should count for doing events like pvp and minigames.

But yeah a change like that is not easy. And maybe I'm being to nostalgic about the past. Of course we had guides who didn't really want to do tours back in those days that was the main reason why the core of the rank changed. I also do not want to blame the current guides for this. This issue is not easy and not new.
I think it is something we as a community need to solve together. We want more tours but then we need more people motivated to do them. Brings me back to we want more jobs but then we need more people motivated to run jobs. Hopefully the return of the foreman rank is our awnser to the lack of jobs. Now we just need to find a solution for the demand of tours and the lack of them..

Now if we can come up with a solution instead of arguing who is at fault for this, then that would be great.

Head Enforcer

just a note to add to @Credoo guide comments I agree with everything he stated. It is difficult to manage. One thing that is perhaps lost with the lack of tours isn't so much the LOTR lore Guides were giving but the inner workings of the server as a whole. Guides during tours would explain the ranks (what they were and what they did and how to achieve them) as well as some history of the server itself.